Harockerce What a beautiful movie!

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

thomaswallingford I'm going to start this review with a comment I read about the movie on a YouTube video. It simply said "Well, That's a Stretch: The Documentary." That sums it up nicely.The wild guesses (I refuse to call them theories or even hypotheses) by the people in the film are breathtakingly stupid. They treat Kubrick like some sort of ubergenius god figure with unsubstantiated claims about his IQ (which I looked up and literally couldn't find anything credible about) and what he may or may not have been reading during the time (again, completely unsubstantiated conjecture). At two points in the documentary, I remember thinking that the film itself even admits that the "evidence" for claims is lacking or nonexistent. One of those points was when the woman talking (I don't remember what her name was because I honestly don't think the documentary introduced anyone), she mentioned how the layout of the hotel was inconsistent and strange. She ascribes some insane meaning to it, but also says that she didn't draw out the maps she has in her head, so just take her word for it. Another point was when a man was talking about how Stanley Kubrick's face is apparently airbrushed in the clouds for one frame of the movie. He says he'd try and "Photoshop it" (or something along those lines) for the documentary, which kind of admits that there's nothing there, but the documentary also goes to where in the film it's supposed to be and doesn't actually point anything out. This is in stark contrast to the fact that most other things will be pointed out by the documentarians either by zooming in, putting a border around it, or any number of other things. The documentarians couldn't find the thing in question, so they didn't point it out. Because it's unfounded nonsense.I watched this with a friend and we constantly asked each other whether or not these people had actually watched movies in their lives other than Kubrick's filmography or The Shining, specifically. The reason we questioned a lot of this is because of the weird, cosmic meanings that the interviewees put on the fact that the action and characters were frequently in the center of the shot.No. That's not hyperbolic. There's a whole section about how the movie, when simultaneously played backwards and forwards and overlaid onto itself, will have characters or action occurring together... in the center of the frame. Then they say it has some meaning to it.But even the weirdest directors sometimes use conventional shots where things happen in the center of the screen. Why? Because of filmmaking convention. Because it's important to shoot it that way sometimes. It doesn't seem like it's that much of a stretch that Stanley Kubrick, who often has long, static shots of a thing in center screen, would have a lot of those things in the same movie.There are even times where the people will blatantly ignore things in the same shot to make a point. There's a part where one guy is talking about the stickers on Danny's door and says that Dopey of the Seven Dwarves is the most prominent sticker on the door because it's the biggest and the furthest toward the center. But in the same shot, you can see that the sticker of Woodstock from Charlie Brown is several times bigger and is also one of the only blue things (because of the massive amount of sky on the sticker) in a frame that is composed of largely yellows and reds. Another time, the lady says a poster of a skier is a minotaur and says "there's a hint of ski poles in the picture, but they're not there" when I was literally looking right at the skiing poles! They're black lines held in the skier's hands! If it's not a skier on a poster in a resort in the mountains of Colorado, then why does it reference Monarch ski resort on the poster? And have a skier. And why does the "minotaur" not have horns? She continues on, apparently not knowing that minotaurs are bull-headed men, not buffalo.Other "points" in the documentary points out a brand of baking powder with a Native American on it. Calumet, specifically. That was given some special meaning about The Shining being a statement on genocide or something, despite the fact that references to Native Americans isn't necessarily a reference to genocide, and the fact that Calumet is a company that exists along with the Heinz, Golden Rey, Libby's, Oreos, and Tree Top, all of which are in the same scene (many in the same shot)!Two quickies: Someone inexplicably says that Jack Nicholson falling down some stairs is referencing another specific movie about Mayans where someone falls down some stairs. There's no reason stated as to why it wouldn't be someone just falling down some stairs in a movie or why it wouldn't be a reference to any other movie where someone falls down some stairs.Someone states that room 237 is evidence that Kubrick faked the moon landing because the moon is 237,000 miles away from Earth, despite it being, on average, nearly 239,000 miles away from Earth. But, for this documentary, being around 2000 miles off is just as good as being on point.It honestly seems as if the people being interviewed for the movie don't understand how movies are made.And as for the technical aspects of the documentary, there are some baffling choices for what is shown when. My friend, who is much more well-versed in cinema than I am, was even frequently confused as to what film certain clips were from or why they were being put over what a person was saying. Frequently, there were cuts to unrelated scenes, despite someone talking about something in the visuals or audio in the scene. Also, there were a great deal of times where the interviewee paused, stopped, or restated a point in different words that should have just been edited out. The most egregious instance of this is when someone's child is yelling in the background and there's at least a full 20 seconds of him wrangling his kid while no other audio is playing. Literally the only reason I gave this movie higher than a one-star rating is because I gave the movie "Evidence" one star because it made me motion sick (and I'd never been motion sick in my life up to that point). So here's a quote for the box art: "Two stars - Didn't make me physically ill."

qmtv Interesting for people obsessed with The Shining.Some of the theories are interesting. Others are a bit or completely far-fetched. Worth checking out for people studying the film and Kubrick's style of film making.Rating is a C or 6 stars.

Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki Pure lunacy, this movie is infuriatingly, enragingly stupid and inept, in its conspiracy theories about what Stanley Kubrick supposedly had in mind when filming The Shining.Its narrative is complete confusion, as the too numerous off-camera speakers are so poorly defined, we cannot be sure who is speaking (rambling) from one scene to the next , much less care about the preposterous theories that The Shining is a commentary about Nazi Germany, due to Jack using a German typewriter, and the kid wearing a number 42 jersey in one scene, or moon landing conspiracies, or Native American genocide, or how they feel as though simple continuity errors (like a chair behind Jack disappearing in between shots) add further validity to their theories. They are desperately searching for a pattern in coincidence, meaning to happenstance.The type of conspiracy theories one might expect to hear spouting from a bum in a park, who scratches lampposts, and talks to trees, but the lowest point in this " documentary " is when, exactly twenty minutes in, the current rambler's small child can obviously be heard sobbing in the background, likely because of this idiotic film being shot in his presence, and he excuses himself to tend to the child. How the bloody hell did that make it into the final cut?

I B Room 237 is a great example of what happens when a state, and even a system, is in a crisis. What this entire film comes down to is that director Stanley Kubrick left hidden messages in his later films, especially in The Shining (1980). This may be true because filmmakers sometimes do this in order to show to the public what they really think or feel. As knowledgeable people know, there's no real freedom of speech. Everything that's made in Hollywood, and in the West in general, contains propaganda. Everything is controlled by the ruling class. The problem with Room 237 is that it's also propaganda. It offers the opinions of several people. These people are said to be Kubrick enthusiasts, and they kind of narrate while we're shown footage from Kubrick's films. The problem with this is that we don't find out who these people are and what their intentions are. Even their faces aren't shown. Why are these people saying what they're saying? Room 237 doesn't tell us. So, it turns out that the goal of this film isn't to educate but to provoke. What we're told in Room 237 is highly questionable. A bit of it may be true, but we, the viewers, have no way of knowing. We don't have access to such information. One thing that's clear to me, however, is that Room 237 is propaganda made by people that serve a faction of the Anglo-American ruling class. Ordinary people often make the mistake of thinking that the ruling class of a country is united and is of one mind. The reality is that the ruling class is composed of factions, each with its own interests. They agree about some things, and they disagree about other things. These different factions try to rally ordinary people to their cause, to their interests, by releasing propaganda through films, books, music, news and any other medium. So, when, for example, election time comes, a faction wants people to vote for the candidate that it's supporting. Each faction would like to have their own man or woman in power. The factions especially begin to disagree and even fight when there's a crisis, like the capitalist economic depression that began in the West in 2008. Based on this, I can tell which faction is behind Room 237. For example, in the film, it's claimed that the Apollo moon landings were faked. At least the footage was faked. This is probably true, but why are we being told this? Is it because the filmmakers are nice? No, it's because they want to shake up the situation and discredit another, dominant, faction of the ruling class. Ordinary people don't have access to secret information about the Apollo program, and the only reason why, in the last few decades, we've been seeing reports about the moon landings being faked is because ruling class factions are disagreeing. So, in this film, we're told about the genocide of Native Americans, the Nazis and other things that we often hear about in the West, but with a spin that's a bit different. It's meant to provoke and make us question what we know. But a lot of what's said in Room 237 is lies. As I've already mentioned, the goal of Room 237 isn't to educate but to provoke. Right after we're told about the Nazis, we're told that Joseph Stalin allegedly starved 3 million people in Western Ukraine. This is not true. It's an obvious capitalist lie. And Stalin never said that the death of one man is a tragedy and that the death of millions is a statistic. It's just another capitalist lie. So, why are we getting these anti-communist lies in Room 237? It's because even the faction that got this film made doesn't want a real revolution, a communist revolution, to happen in the USA. I'm thinking that this faction is the same one that promotes so-called conservative propagandists like Alex Jones, Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart. Half the time these people talk about liberty and the free market, and the other half they dedicate to lying about communism, the Soviet Union, and especially Joseph Stalin. They push the interests of their faction of the ruling class, but they also don't want for a communist or a socialist revolution to happen, one that would sweep away the entire capitalist ruling class. This is the faction that wants to lower wages in the USA and to destroy the welfare state. Sure, some of these people may be against America's wars, but not because they're nice. They just want to rally as many dupes as possible to their cause, to their political candidates from the Republican Party.